Letters From the Cape
Lucie Duff-Gordon
(Forgotten Books, June 22, 2017)
Excerpt from Letters From the CapeThe daughter of John and Sarah Austin ran every risk of growing up a blue-stocking. Yet she escaped every danger of the kind - the proximity of Bentham, her childish friendships with Henry Reeve and the Mills, and the formidable presence of the learned friends of both her parents - by the force of a triumphant naturalness and humour which remained with her to the end of her life. Although her schooling was in Germany and her sympathy with German character was remarkable, her own person ality was rather French in its grace and gaiety. It was characteristic of her, then, to defend as she did la vieille gaieté francaise against Heine on his death-bed. But the truth is that her sympathies were nearly perfect. She\was one of those rare characters that see the best in every nationality without aping cosmopolitanism, simply because they are content everywhere to be human. Con vention and prejudice vex them as little as pedantry can. Their clear eyes look out each morning on a fresh world, and their experiences are a perpetual school of sympathy and never the sad routine of disillusionment.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.